Who was an important activist of the civil rights movements of the 1960s?
The most important civil rights activist of the 1960’s was Martin Luther King, Jr. He first came to prominence during in 1955 when he organized a protest in support of Rosa Parks, a black woman who was arrested in Alabama for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a Birmingham bus. He helped organize a bus strike that finally resulted in black being able to sit where they wanted to on public transportation. By 1962, he worked out an agreement with the Justice Department that abolished separate drinking fountains, sitting rooms and lunch counters for Blacks. In 1963, his march on Washington D.C. resulted in 250,000 people listening to his “I Have a Dream Speech. In 1964, King became the youngest person to ever be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He continued his activism until the day he was assassinated in 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee.
